Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe
It isn’t a failure that Time Reborn doesn’t answer questions—what is important is realization that the framework in which we do physics, rely on math, and oversimplify the world to fit our algorithms and equations is examined and excoriated as wish fulfillment. The digital age continues to reduce people to numbers and alters the world to fit the lens of self-effacing code. It is increasingly important to avoid a fallacious “natural” justification for mathematical simplicity in attempting to understand the universe, else risk giving credence to a "true" or "pure" mathematical view of markets or web traffic or any other social construct.
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Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking
Quiet seems to want to claim a piece of “...the self-help industry, into which hundreds of thousands of Americans pour their hearts, souls, and some $11 billion a year...” and lands firmly in the self-justification section. The anecdotes typically reinforce this dim view. Rather than appealing in a Mlodinowian style that provide a personal connection to the the underlying facts, many vignettes are simply synecdoche in the guise of specificity:
The quiet persistence shown by many Asians, and Asian-Americans, is not limited to the fields of math and science. Several years after my first trip to Cupertino, I caught up with Tiffany Liao, the Swarthmore-bound high school student whose parents had praised her so highly for loving to read, even in public, when she was a young girl. When we first met, Tiffany was a baby-faced seventeen-year-old on her way to college, She told me then that she was excited to travel to the East Coast and meet new people, but was also afraid of living in a place where no one else would drink bubble tea, the popular drink invented in Taiwan.
It’s not that the story of Ms. Liao isn’t compelling, it’s that she is meant to stand in for “Introverts” with a capital “i”. It reaches too far. That is what made so many sections of this book a complete slog; granular anecdotes are wedged into a framework that is then extended beyond their incredibly narrow scope.
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Melmoth
Melmoth the Witness, denier of the resurrection of Christ, damned to walk the earth as witness to humanity’s secret sins. She is our global order in freefall: viewer of systemic evil as it crushes humanity into despair. Hers are the steps—the C.S. Lewis Inner Ring speech—that gently caress a person into becoming a monster:
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The Buried Giant
While I still visit the Fantasy section, it is like returning to your hometown after college—you’re happy to be there for a short while, but you won’t be taking anything with you when you leave. Looking at the covers and reading the blurbs, most of it is just doesn’t hit me in the same way; I cannot care about another teenage sorcerer or a child pirate that turns out to be an heiress or dragon in disguise. Not because I am above goblins or faeries or enchanted accoutrements, but because the writing can often be embarrassing. I still enjoy the plots, even if they do tend toward clichéd; it isn’t exactly fair to read hundreds of Fantasy paperbacks and expect to be surprised—that familiarity breeds comfort and is part of the appeal, anyway—but that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to drag myself through the level of prose that felt appropriate to me two decades ago
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Turing's Cathedral
It is difficult to keep the obvious truth—that computers were recently created by people—in plain view. George Dyson is Hesiod for the Prometheus tale of the men and women of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Access to accurate documentation of a creation myth—the origin of electronic computers, technology as simultaneously useful and dangerous as fire—makes Turing’s Cathedral a strong recommendation for anyone.
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The Vorrh
Maybe if it is your thing—weird, indescribable plots filled with horrible atrocities and seemingly pointless activities bound together in beautiful words and engaging, thoroughly bizarre, characters—then this will be your book.
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Acceptance
But the comfort of the familiar cannot be discounted, even when one considers the familiar rather tedious. So I launched, pell-mell, into Acceptance within a day of closing Authority. Can I blame the publishers for having all three books published within the same year? Probably not. Did the availability—the difference between joyously snoozing past your alarm on a workday and popping up full-awake at 7am on a lazy Sunday morning—contribute to my burnout, or might I never have returned at all if time had forced distance?
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The Folly of the World
In keeping with genre fantasy are the requisite scenes of a sexual nature—The Folly of the World adroitly positions them as character development and applies their substance to reinforce the plot, rather than as the adolescent titillation of the prototypical hero’s journey where a heteronormative questing team's budding romance plays out with tepid ennui. The explicit detail is dialed up, but beyond the smut sits a standard plot of three adventures searching for a bauble; the rub is that all three are miscreants and the tale is told in increasingly unreliable voices. The plot is vehicle for character development—standard genre constructions apply.
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Authority
Authority brings the periphery into view, and you quickly find it better remained in the imagination.
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Annihilation
Plotwise, not a whole lot actually happens. Its strength lies in the cohesiveness of its narrator and her interpretations of the world as it shatters around her. She remains the same, for the most part, and learning about her is a treat. That she’s rational to the point of robotic makes her the perfect narrative lens and accounts for some of her actions; as readers, of course we want the narrator to take the dangerous, almost ludicrous risks. “No coincidence, no story.”
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The Golem and the Jinni
The ubiquity of multi-point-of-view narration that has overtaken modern fiction fits smoothly into The Golem and the Jinni. Both characters address the same concerns—apartments, jobs, friends, society—in very different ways. The swaps of narrative perspective at the chapter breaks do what they should in a great book; the reader wants to continue with the Golem at the start of a Jinn chapter, yet at the start of a Golem chapter the recently ended Jinn chapter lingers in the mind. As the two characters’ lives become intertwined, the perspective swaps increase in both speed in frequency, sometimes occurring multiples times within the same chapter. This structural choice emphasizes their relationship in a way that rigid “one chapter, one perspective” would not, and heightens the ties that bind them together in the mind of the reader. Their separate and unique stories have fused together in a very real, physical way.
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On Immunity: An Inoculation
Reviewing is not static regurgitation—it is not pumping out synopses but filtering words through one's self: speaking to whether I enjoyed or didn’t enjoy a book; whether the knowledge was worthwhile or worthless; whether the whole experience came together into something greater than ink on a page. I respect the books I choose to spend my time with, and I expect them to respect me. I never sit down with a book and cackle eagerly as I scheme to hoist the author by his or her own petard. I am open to the words—I want to hear them. That is why I am reading. Books, ideally, have my trust until they lose it; I try my best not to crack a cover with my view already askance, awaiting the narrative to conform to my expectations before I will accept what it says. On Immunity didn’t insult me. It isn’t trying to sell me something, isn’t trying to change my mind or shame anyone or garner more clicks with inflammatory rhetoric. It makes statements; it supports them with evidence. It conveys thoughts; it presents them as logical and introspective. It is a lovely book, honest to what it is; no polemic but a narrative absorbing and reforming the zeitgeist around vaccination.
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Cruel Optimism
More capitalist entrenchment begets less mobility: see our current globe-spanning supply chains that require a handful of ultra-powerful conglomerates to maintain them. It certainly feels like there aren’t a lot of options for, say, food, outside of industrial agriculture. Certainly not on the lower end of the economic spectrum, and all of a sudden you are focusing on your car, apartment, cell phone payments and supporting all these necessities have forced you out of planning the revolution. The system maintains itself while precluding real thought of anything else. And its primacy in culture colors everything:
[Slow death, the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence] takes as its point of departure David Harvey’s polemical observation, in Spaces of Hope, that under capitalism sickness is defined as the inability to work.
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The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
Colonialism via capital-accumulation proxy may staunch during the resurgence of baronial dynasty at home, but likely it will only be further masked by our own suffering as wealth continues to congeal amongst the top stratum. In short, without any hands on the levers of government except the very wealthy, we’ll all get fucked.
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The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business
“To smell this fish, please click ‘I accept’. By accepting, you have given permission for all data about your fish-selecting to be entered into a database so that in the future, only the fish we think you might enjoy will be presented. Unless one of those Congolese fisherwomen pay us a small advertising fee; then we’ll cram whatever shit she dredges out of the lake into your face first. Algorithms!”
I can’t imagine a better future.
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Nothing is True and Everything is Possible
Structure is required. It doesn’t really matter what the structure is. People live in patterns and create habits and fill in blanks and extrapolate thoughts like we extrapolate breath. Does anyone live in the moment, survive and thrive solely within each single breath? Not particularly; we string together a thousand-thousand single breaths, reorder our own minds into a great tapestry of meaning and coherence. Structure is applied to the inherently structureless. Such is life.
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Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism
The green-leaf iconography and pleasing homeliness of “natural gas”—signifiers of ecological foresight or pluralistic promise—are still based on money; a wealthy man with connections happens to own a lot of natural gas. Now that resource will be sold as environmental to a society hungry for a veneer of change that doesn’t require any sort of sacrifice—pretty pictures, pretty thoughts, dirty world.
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Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media
Habit produces freedom for thought beyond immediacy—how much time would I waste, in my daily life, if I had to think about every breath I took?—but habit can force us down paths that are no longer beneficial. Once habits become unmoored from the goals they supported, their vestigial remains can haunt us, warp the way we approach the world:
Although goals can be satisfied in various ways, there is only one way to satisfy a habit: by repeating it exactly.
After a generation of watching images on a screen and being told over and over, “This isn’t real, this is just entertainment,” the habit of dismissing the flickering shadows projected into our lives has become our reality. We don’t believe what we see, nor do we even believe what we say—the always-on nature of the network means your “brand” can never waver: always be riffing; I’m just kidding. Unless…; say whatever gets the most likes. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to retweet it, does it make an impact?
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